That Time We Tricked the Internet Into Following a Paperclip on Twitter

Photo By Ariel Zambelich

Sometimes the Internet is weird. Like yesterday, when we ran an experiment to see if we could harness Twitter’s recommendation service to get 200 people to follow an inactive Twitter parody account, and the CEO of Microsoft ended up chiming in.

So yesterday, our intern edit fellow Pranav came across a Clippy the Paperclip parody Twitter account, and dropped a link to it in our group chat. You remember Clippy: the overly-helpful paperclip from the ghost of Microsoft Office Past that would appear and offer to help you write a letter.

“Looks like Clippy does have a Twitter account,” he wrote, “but only 1 follower.” In response to this news, our editor Bryan replied “2.” Then the rest of the GadgetLab team piled on, following this fake Clippy as well, for no good reason other than it’s one of those dumb things you do when everyone in the office is on the same group chat.

A casual office thing, yeah, but it led us to wonder about the nature of popularity on Twitter, and what makes people follow certain accounts. There are so many dead parody accounts that never amounted to anything. This seemed to be yet another. But could we make it popular? Could we, in fact, engineer its success without actually promoting it? We wondered if we could trigger some herd-behavior and get a fake paperclip that had never even tweeted to 200 Twitter followers solely on the strength of Twitter’s recommendation technology.

Twitter has this feature where it sends you a notification if enough of your network follows an account for the first time. It grew out of a feature called Magic Recs, and although it’s billed as a recommendation engine, it basically encourages people to follow along bandwagon style. Because the GadgetLab crew tends to both follow and be followed by the same circles of journalists and tech-industry types, we assumed our actions might have already triggered a follow notification.

But just to be safe, we enlisted a few friends. On a back channel, I asked Roberto Baldwin, Mike Isaac and Brian Barrett to follow Clippy, with a brief explanation. As it turns out, by the time I asked Barrett, he’d already gotten a notification. I went on to ask Sam Biddle, Andre Torrez, and Matt Haughey. (Biddle, it turned out, had also received a notification.) We were on our way.

Almost instantly, other people began following. It shot up to 50 followers within an hour or so. Anil Dash was the first person with a sizable audience to join in, presumably sending Magic Rec alerts out to an even wider circle. Twitter developer Menotti Minutillo pondered why everyone was interested in a silent anthropomorphic paperclip.

how are so many people following @ClippyTheClip and it hasn't even tweeted yet?

By this point, ClippyTheClip’s followers included writers for The Daily Dot, TechCrunch, PC World, Pando Daily and The New Yorker’s science and technology, blog Elements. Editors from ReadWriteWeb and The Verge tagged along. So too did some Twitter employees, and a venture capitalist. We saw a few PR folks in the mix.

But why?

“I followed mostly to figure our why others did, and because I like Clippy,” Dash explained over IM. Dash also happens to be founder of a company called ThinkUp, which tracks Twitter analytics and follower behavior. He studies this stuff for a living. He chalked up his decision to follow to, well, “strong peer pressure from Magic Recs.”

By last night, although the account was well over 100, it seemed to have stalled out short of 200. It seemed like we weren’t going to get there. Meanwhile, ClippyTheClip had come alive, tweeting with abandon–not that it mattered. And then something remarkable happened.

Satya Nadella, the new CEO of Microsoft just 51 days into his job, replied to one of The Clip’s tweets. To put this in perspective, it’s the very first time Nadella has ever replied to anyone on Twitter. This pointless paperclip, followed by a who’s-who of prominent technology reporters caught his eye. ClippytheClip almost immediately shot past 300 followers. Our little experiment had worked.

It seemed that with the right mix of people–and not very many of them at that–you could in fact use Twitter’s recommendation service to get people to follow just about anything.

Now, you can argue that this had nothing to do with herd mentality. Maybe people just wanted to follow a Clippy parody Twitter account. And clearly they do, because a previously existing one, TheClippy, already has more than 2,000 followers. Oh, and then there’s PaperClippy, which has nearly 2,000.

Yet the very existence of those accounts (one of which seems none too pleased about the newest Clippy) would seem to be an argument against ClippyTheClip taking off. Especially because as it turns out, not only did ClippytheClip have zero tweets and one follower when Pranav stumbled across it yesterday, it had just been created. It was brand new.

I didn’t actually realize this until it was pointed out to me last night. I had assumed, incorrectly, that it was one of the very many parody Twitter accounts that is created with intentions that are never followed up on. Those things are everywhere. But other people were more suspicious.

I tried to explain to Glenn that this was just our experiment in herd mentality. That we hadn’t created it, just helped drive it. But… he had a point. How had Pranav found it?

I confronted Pranav with my suspicion when he arrived in the office this morning. He denied it, but with a smile. I asked again, and he fessed up.

It turns out that while we were trying to punk Twitter, our own intern editorial fellow was punking us. And he used his parody paperclip account to talk to the CEO of Microsoft–a feat no one else at Wired has managed to pull off yet. Good job, Pranav. You got us. Now go get me some coffee.